Back in 2007 I tried, unsuccessfully I might add, to do a 365 photo project. The plan being that I would post a picture of me every day for a year. For reasons I can’t remember I decided to use the idea of reflections, talking pictures of me reflected in different things rather than just a straight portrait picture.
In 2010 I got an E-mail from Enda O’Donoghue asking about using one of the pictures, I promptly ignored it. To his credit Enda wasn’t put off by my ignorance, he mailed again and again all of which I ignored. Then he mailed Marty a friend of mine who had commented on a few of my pictures, Marty forwarded the mail on to me and I couldn’t ignore Enda any more.
I mailed Enda and he told me this about his painting project.
Let me explain… I am an Irish artist, based in Berlin, Germany. My work involves the use of found images from the Internet to create paintings. I am particularly interested in images which in some way or other show a sense of, what I would see as, “normal” or “everyday” life as presented online. Images that could easily be just lost or forgotten about and gather dust (or the digital version of dust) on the Internet. The other main interest I have in selecting the images is that they have some obvious traces of the digital technology such as pixilation.
I have a slow and methodical process of painting from these images that plays with the idea of pixels and digital glitches and the similarities between the final painted image and the found image vary from piece to piece. In some cases the transformation from the digital image to the painting involves changing the image in ways, which make it almost unrecognizable from the original, while in other cases the painting and the original image remain quite similar in appearance.
It transpired that Enda wanted permission to use this picture from my collection.
Evening
Because I had been so ignorant to his E-mails Enda had already taken my photo and used it to create this painting.
Seeing as he had gone to the trouble of hunting me down, refusing to be ignored by me and had already created this picture, I could hardly refuse him permission.
Now Enda had got my attention, he asked for permission to use another one of my photos
Black & White today
which I granted. I had forgotten all about the pictures and never expected to hear anything about it again, then in August I got a further E-mail from him saying that he has managed to turn the photograph in to a set of 12 small canvases which look like this when they are hung.
How Enda didn’t go quite mad painting the same thing 12 times I don’t know, I lose the will to live painting a skirting board.
These paintings are part of an exhibition called The Mobility Project which was exhibited in Berlin in June this year and will be shown in Coventry in December. Do look out for it and visit the exhibition if you are in the midlands, you can say you know the artists model and just be thankful that Enda doesn’t paint in the style of Lucian Freud and it is not a picture of me laying naked on a sofa that I am posting about 
I’m looking forward to seeing the actual paintings rather than the photographs which Enda so kindly sends to me.
If you need any further confirmation of my tardiness, I said I was going to write this blog post in January when we first started E-mailing…..
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